Flocking to the faith

Why Obama is wrong to pander to evangelicals

In the old days politicians would slip preachers some
hundreds under the table and preachers would deliver the flock on Election
Day. It was borderline illegal, but at least it left the Constitution
alone. The same could not be said of the Bush administration's
faith-based initiative, a political bribe to the religious right that put a
hole in the First Amendment big enough for Christ himself to walk
through.

Given the dismal results of the initiative —
millions wasted, many lawsuits, embarrassments like special Christians-only
prison units and Faith Works, which aspired to bring "homeless
addicts to Christ" — you would think getting rid of federal
handouts to churches for social services would be one change we'd all
be ready to believe in.

But no. As he announced earlier this summer, Barack
Obama plans to open the spigot even wider, beginning with half-a-billion
dollars for summer classes for 1 million poor kids and presumably moving on
to help for prisoners, addicts, and other unfortunates. Perhaps worn down
by years of being bashed as elitists ignorant of the real America, many
liberals and progressives seem prepared to go along. Difficult as it is to
dissent from the feel-good community spirit in which Obama casts his
proposals — who wants to be the curmudgeon while people are in
obvious need? — this is a major failure of nerve.

Obama may have given his initiative an
inclusive-sounding name — the President's Council for
Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships — and he may insist that
with proper oversight government money can go to religious institutions
without going to religious purposes, like proselytizing. He wouldn't
let churches discriminate in hiring for these programs or provide services
only to their own (although the U.S. Supreme Court permits religious
discrimination in church hiring, even for janitorial jobs).

Although Obama stresses his determination to help
"the smallest storefront churches and mosques" apply for
funding, in real life the religious organizations with the bureaucratic
know-how and political connections to go after the money will be the same
as those under Bush. Much of the funding, then, will still go to socially
conservative white Christians. Indeed, that's the point, as analysts
acknowledge when they cite the measure as part of Obama's attempt to
win over this largely Republican demographic. He's not going to win
their votes by cutting them out in favor of inner-city minimosques. In
fact, it doesn't look like he's going to do it at all; despite
the God talk, Obama's polling only 22 percent of the white
evangelical vote, which is exactly what the notoriously religiously
tone-deaf John Kerry got in 2004.

Of course, winning votes isn't the only reason
Obama favors faith-based funding. He also says that our problems are
"too big for government alone to solve" so "we need an
all-hands-on-deck approach." I'm all for volunteering, but tell
me again why we've given up on the idea of publicly providing people
with the services they need?

In other wealthy industrialized countries, children
learn to read in school, not the church basement. Poor families get income
supports that enable them to buy their own groceries; they don't have
to eat in soup kitchens. Why does Obama want to subsidize churches rather
than beef up our frayed public realm? Every dollar that goes to a
faith-based program is a dollar that doesn't go to a cash-starved
public service — to libraries, Head Start, community mental-health
clinics, and so on.

Obama is right that our problems are very big —
but that's an argument against giving money to churches.

Katha Pollitt is a
regular columnist for

TheNation magazine. Her latest book is Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories.